odditiesoflife:
Monstrorum Historia (A History of Monsters), 1642
Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522 — 1605) was an Italian naturalist and physician, also known as Ulysses Aldrovandi, or simply as Aldrovandus. He helped lead the Renaissance movement that placed a renewed emphasis on the study of nature.
One of the many books he wrote was Monstrorum Historia (“A History of Monsters”), a compendium of reported human and animal monstrosities. The book included accounts not only of monstrous natural births but also of entirely imaginary, extremely far-fetched monsters. This sort of juxtaposition was common at the time, since there was not as yet a distinction between the literary and the scientific.